| Birth Date: | 1980 |
| Occupation: | Historian |
| Spouse: | Keith Richotte |
| Children: | 1 |
| Thesis Title: | Envisioning Nationhood: Kiowa Expressive Culture, 1875-1939 |
| Thesis Year: | 2009 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Jean O'Brien |
| Alma Mater: | |
| Discipline: | Native American studies |
| Sub Discipline: | History of the Kiowa |
| Work Institutions: | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote (1980 – August 8, 2020) was an American Kiowa academic. She was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she taught Native American studies, and she was the author of (2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize.
She was born in 1980 to Debbie and Preston Tone-Pah-Hote, a Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma storyteller.[1] Her grandfather Murray Tone-Pah-Hote was a silversmith and her great-grandmother Tahdo Ahtone was a cradleboard artist. She was raised in Orrick, Missouri, and graduated from Orrick High School in 1998.[2]
She studied at the University of Missouri on a Ronald E. McNair Scholarship, where she got a BA in History (2001), before moving on to the University of Minnesota, where she got a PhD in History (2009). Her doctoral dissertation Envisioning Nationhood: Kiowa Expressive Culture, 1875-1939 was supervised by Jean O'Brien.[3] She later joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in 2009, where after starting out as a postdoctoral fellow, she was later promoted to assistant professor and eventually associate professor. At UNC, she taught courses on Native American studies, one of which focused on the Kiowa people.[4]
As an academic, she specialized in Native American history and culture.[4] In 2017, she was appointed the University of Missouri's first Cherng Distinguished Scholar, so on November 2, she held the lecture "We’ll Show You Boys How to Dance: Kiowa Dance and Painting, 1928-1940", based on research she did for a book project.[5] In January 2019, she published , a book on the history of Kiowa identity;[6] it was one of three finalists for the 2020 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize.[7] In July 2019, as part of her research, she made a visit to the Museum of the Great Plains.[8]
In 2020, she was hospitalized for leukemia; she died from the illness on August 8, 2020.[9]
She has a son, who was four at the time of his mother's death. Her husband Keith Richotte is an academic.
She was a member of the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma.